Recipes, Craft and Party Ideas

My creative medium of choice would most definitely have to be paper. I feel much more confident with paper than I do with fabric or food or any other type of creative endeavour. I have a new paper crush on Japanese origami paper. In preparation for Goose’s Japanese themed birthday party, Goose & I have been playing around with paper…

I always like the idea of making water a more enticing option at parties so Goose and I peeled off the original labels, googled the Japanese symbol for water and used a free Japanese style font from here to type ‘Water’ (for those who don’t actually read Japanese). Then we stuck them on some of our favorite origami paper with a glue stick and we had some very cool looking water bottles, if I do say so myself!

We also had some fun making our very own cocktail umbrellas with origami paper also. Follow the tutorial here if you’d like to make some of your own. We drank it in little shot glasses – meant to be representing somewhat the little teacups used in Japan – containing some peach tea granita.

To make your own granita there is a tutorial here, but we just made up some Bickford’s Peach Tea cordial and poured it into a metal slice tin, popped it in the freezer for a couple of hours, then scraped it with a fork roughly every hour after that until it became a granita type consistency. To drink/eat, we poured (using a Japanese teapot of course) some soda water on top of the granita for a fun refreshment at the party! A sprig of mint from the garden doesn’t go astray either.

Continuing on our paper theme Goose continued to make literally hundreds of paper cranes, her obsession knows no bounds…

Being summer and all, it was the wrong season for some real blossom branches, so we used some scrunched up pink tissue paper to make our very own cherry blossom tree.

As I am more than a little party obsessed and because my party posts are the most popular on this little blog of mine with people searching for ideas for their own parties (just as I do myself!), I’ll be breaking the party up into many different posts with as much detail as possible, so stay tuned for quite a bit more Japanese inspired creativeness over the coming week!

P.S. While on the topic of Japanese, paper and parties, you’ll find some great Japanese style printables – some of which I used in the party – here, here, here and here.